Vienna 1815 Introducing a European Security Culture

Beatrice de Graaf, Ido de Haan and Brian Vick*

Wine in Vienna In 1814–15, Hans von Gagern, German nobleman and freelance diplomat, acted as the plenipotentiary for the Prince of Orange, later King William I of the Netherlands, at the Congress of Vienna. Hosting numerous meetings at his rooms on the Bräunerstrasse in Vienna, where he outshone many other representatives by serving the most copious dinners and celebrated wines, he exempliﬁed a new type of diplomat.1 Experienced, urbane, ﬂexible, not attached to ancient forms and rituals, but pragmatic and to the point, he offered William straightforward advice: Your Royal Highness is entering the larger European system as one of its powers. From now on, your politics need to show your colour. One should not isolate oneself, and whoever does runs the risk of hurting oneself in the long run. [...] Name, honour and immediate interest dictate your Royal Highness to appear and be perceived as the defender of justice, as the champion and hope of the oppressed. Gagern urged William to stand up for the ‘security and interests’ of other, smaller nations and peoples.2 When consequently in June 1815 the Central Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine was created, the Netherlands and

* Beatrice de Graaf has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007–13) / ERC Grant Agreement n.615313. The Editors wish to thank Susanne Keesman for her invaluable assistance as managing editor; and Yannick Balk, Celine Mureau and Annelotte Janse for their assistance in editing this volume’s many footnotes. We furthermore would like to thank John Kok for his excellent native editing of part of the chapters in this volume and Carla Spiegel for making the index. 1 Cf. M. Hundt, Die mindermächtigen deutschen Staaten auf dem Wiener Kongress (Mainz: Zabern, 1996), 105–10; E.E. Kraehe, Metternich’s German Policy. The Congress of Vienna, 1814–1815, vol.II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 177; H. Rössler, Zwischen Revolution und Reaktion: Ein Lebensbild des Reichsfreiherrn Hans Christoph von Gagern, 1766–1852 (Göttingen: Musterschmidt, 1958). 2 ‘Von Gagern to William I, Report III, Vienna 26 November 1814’; ‘William to Von Gagern, Brussels 14 December 1814’, National Archives The Hague (NL-HaNA), Algemene Staats- secretarie, 2.02.01, inv.no.6356. Cf. Correspondence between William and Von Gagern in Hessisches Staatsarchiv Darmstadt (HStD), Familienarchiv der Freiherrn von Gagern, Files O11&B24.

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the smaller principalities along the river – together with Prussia – accepted a legal constitution and a supranational court to settle disputes and conflicts along the Rhine. They thus mutually restrained one another from pursuing unilateral interests, such as restricting free passage, and fought smugglers together.3 The free trade regime was even extended to the Elbe and Polish rivers, and to the Po. This Rhine regime exemplifies how, following from the effervescent Con- gress of Vienna, the European powers established elementary conditions not only for the protection of the ‘status quo’4 and the regulation of interstate conflict through ‘political equilibrium’, as the literature on this era has it,5 but also for the creation of a system of collective security, the ‘Pax Europeana’,in which common European interests had to be debated, defined and defended together. Over two hundred years after the Final Act was concluded, it is time to remember, reassess and analyse the extent to which the Congress of Vienna produced new modes of security management, or what we can call new security cultures, combining pre-revolutionary, Napoleonic and post- Napoleonic ideas and practices of peace, stability and order in Europe.6 This volume aims to bring into focus the ways in which the Vienna Settlement went far beyond establishing a balance of power, and how a set of European institutions, practices and agents, as well as ideals, principles and perceptions, embedded the territorial settlements in a European security culture. This volume’s primary objective is to analyse and explain the development of this ‘European security culture’ between 1815 and 1914. By this we mean the sum of mutually shared, and often conflicting, perceptions of vital interests

3 ‘Treaty of the Rhine Commission’, Rheinurkunden. Sammlung Zwischenstaatlicher Vereinbar- ungen, Landesrechtlicher Ausfuehrungsverordnungen und sonstiger wichtiger Urkunden über die Rheinschiffahrt seit 1803, vol.1 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1918), 42–50. See for an overview of William’s and Von Gagern’s initiative B.A. de Graaf, ‘Second-tier Diplomacy: Hans von Gagern and William I in their quest for an alternative European order, 1813–1818’, Journal for Modern European History, 12:4 (2014), 546–66. 4 J.L. Klüber (ed.), Acten des Wiener Congresses in den Jahren 1814 und 1815, vol.II (Erlangen: Palm, 1817), 530–7. ‘Repose’ or ‘tranquility’ were Metternich’s favourite words. See ‘Metter- nich to Franz Georg, 8 June 1815’, Metternich family papers. Rodinný archive Metternissky. Acta Clementina, Correspondance politique Autriche. Cart 49, vol.5. Státní Ústrední Archiv Prague (SUA). Cf. M. Schulz, Normen und Praxis. Das Europäische Konzert der Großmächte als Sicherheitsrat, 1815–1860 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2009), 74, 559, fn.90. 5 P.W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics 1763–1848 (Oxford: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 1994); Kraehe, Metternich’s German Policy,3–17. 6 For detailed accounts of the Congress, see B.E. Vick, The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics after Napoleon (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014); W.D. Gruner, Der Wiener Kongress 1814/15 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2014); R. Stauber, Der Wiener Kongress (Vienna: Böhlau, 2014); M. Jarrett, The Congress of Vienna and Its Legacy: War and Great Power Diplomacy after Napoleon (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013); G. Dallas, 1815. The Roads to Waterloo (New York: Random House, 2011).

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and threats, as well as the institutions and practices through which different agents acted together upon these ideas and expectations. These themes are addressed in the volume by numerous prominent scholars as well as a new generation of researchers in the field, as they trace the emergence of a new European security culture after the fall of Napoleon. In doing so we offer three main contributions to the scholarship on the Congress of Vienna and its consequences. Firstly, the essays sketch out a new and more detailed understanding of the nature of the Vienna Settlement of 1815 and its aftermath. By presenting the agreements as both the product of an emerging European security culture and as its founding, we focus on the institutions in which this culture was consolidated and on the actors who brought about and maintained these institutions, as well as their motives and ideas. More broadly, we illuminate the concepts, images and narratives of peace, order, conflict and danger that helped to call forth and legitimate this new security culture. Secondly, these studies contribute to debates within the history and the theory of International Relations about security, securitisation and security culture, which so far have focused on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.7 Here, we develop the historiography on the trajectories of securitisation in the nineteenth century, and in this way enrich the theoretical and conceptual insights into the workings and logics of security provided by IR studies. Finally, we expand the timeframe of the history of international cooperation well beyond the traditional threshold of histories of international governance, which generally view the Congress of Vienna merely as a prologue to a narrative that starts only in the second half of the nineteenth century.8 The essays in this volume ultimately show how already in the first quarter of the nineteenth century new multilateral cooperative institutions, habits and perceptions emerged, which contributed to a system of European collective security. Such an approach directs attention to the range of institutions, agents and practices operating between the levels of the congress summit meetings and the traditional bilateral diplomacy from court to court. This new perspective also brings into focus how the caesura between the Congress system of 1814–22 and the subsequent Concert of Europe is less sharp than usually depicted, and the continuities considerably greater, with implications

7 E.g. B. Buzan, People, States and Fear: The National Security Problem in International Relations (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1983); B. Buzan, O. Wæver and J. de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1998); M. de Goede, European Security Culture: Preemption and Precaution in European Security. Inaugural lecture University of Amsterdam (Amsterdam: Vossius Press, 2011). 8 E.g. M. Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present (New York: Penguin, 2012).

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for our understanding of the long period of relative peace in Europe during the nineteenth century.

Vienna 1815: The Emergence of a European Security Culture Postulating the emergence of a European security culture, in the broadest sense of the word, from 1815 onwards may seem counterintuitive. Scholars in the history of international relations usually acknowledge the emergence of a European ‘conscience juridique du monde civilisé’ and the corresponding peace and international rights movement in the course of the nineteenth century.9 Yet they frequently situate the beginnings of European security cooperation only after 1918 with the establishment of the League of Nations and Interpol. In their view, the nineteenth century should be interpreted as an era characterised by the realist paradigm of a balance of power, the so-called Concert of Europe where states pursuing their own interests were the main actors.10 Current historical literature often views the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century through this lens as well – despite the obvious element of cooperative diplomacy implied in the term ‘concert’–and sees the second half as shaped by bellicose nationalism rather than by collective security.11 And although a growing body of work on nongovernmental transnational social movements exists, concrete forms and practices of international and supranational security cooperation in the nineteenth century have been largely overlooked.12 Over the last few years, however, more sophisticated narratives about the Congress of Vienna have begun to replace the ‘balance of power’ concept with terms like ‘hegemony’, ‘political equilibrium’,or‘inﬂuence politics’. They signal a gradual shift away from focussing primarily on classical diplomacy, as

9 L. Tedoldi, ‘Costruire la giustizia internazionale. Alle origini delle organizzazioni giudiziarie internazionali: temi e problemi’, Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento,35 (2009), 11–37. 10 Predominantly H. Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 78–102. Also H. Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977); R. Jervis, ‘From balance to concert: A study of international security cooperation’, in K.A. Oye (ed.), Cooperation under Anarchy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 58–79; J.J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: Norton, 2001). For a more nuanced version see G.J. Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 80–116. 11 J. Leonhard, Bellizismus und Nation: Kriegsdeutung und Nationsbestimmung in Europa und den Vereinigten Staaten 1750–1914 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2008). 12 J. Boli and G.M. Thomas (eds.), Constructing World Culture: International Nongovernmental Organizations since 1875 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); M.H. Geyer and J. Paulmann (eds.), Mechanics of Internationalism: Culture, Society and Politics from the 1840s to the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); J. Osterhammel and N.P. Petersson, Geschichte der Globalisierung: Dimensionen, Prozesse, Epochen (Munich: Beck, 2003).

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high-level inter-state relations and conflicts and their outcomes, to unpacking and analysing decision-making processes and considering the role of broader political culture and the realm of ‘norms and practices’.13 In considering the collective threats and interests that, in the perception of the larger and smaller powers of Europe gathered in Vienna, required a collective answer, it is important to emphasise that the powers did not only convene between 1814 and 1815 but also endeavoured to continue and to institutionalise their cooperation thereafter. These multilateral security networks engaged multifarious agents from different branches of government (military, naval, police, judicial and administrative) and involved both military interventions and judicial regimes.14 Their efforts included the fight against purported international revolutionary conspiracies and uprisings (fears of which seemed to be confirmed by revolts in 1819–21, 1825, 1830, 1848 and 1871), but also attempts to regulate international river traffic and European collaboration to counter piracy, corsairing, privateering (state-commissioned attacks on foreign commercial vessels) and contraband slave trading.15 These mixed and multilateral ventures did not end after the Crimean War, but persisted for decades thereafter, for example in the maritime Commission of the Danube (from 1856 onwards), the European expedition to Lebanon and Syria and the ensuing supervision over the Mutasarrifiate regime (1860–1914), the joint Capitulations and Mixed Courts regime in Egypt (from 1876), the Anti-Anarchist Campaign (1881–1914) and the intervention against the Boxer uprising in China and subsequent reparations commission (1898–1901). These security arrangements were not ad hoc undertakings or incidental, bilateral campaigns, but instead instances of truly supranational or transnational cooperation, mostly accompanied by binding laws, courts, standing conferences and instruments of monitoring, mediation and control that profoundly impacted the perception and handling of security issues in the years thereafter. Significantly, many of these multilateral security and humanitarian initiatives also already involved the activities of a variety of nongovernmental actors and organisations from across Europe as they lobbied, gathered

13 Cf. Vick, Congress of Vienna; Schulz, Normen und Praxis; W. Pyta (ed.), Das europäische Mächtekonzert: Friedens- und Sicherheitspolitik vom Wiener Kongress 1815 bis zum Krimkrieg 1853 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2009). 14 Cf. J. Dülffer, M. Kröger and H. Wippich, Vermiedene Kriege: Deeskalation von Konﬂikten der Grossmächte zwischen Krimkrieg und Erstem Weltkrieg (1856–1914) (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1997). 15 Cf. K. Härter, ‘Security and cross-border political crime: the formation of transnational security regimes in 18th and 19th Century Europe’, Historical Social Research, 38:1 (2013), 96–106; F. Klose, ‘Humanitäre Intervention und internationale Gerichtsbarkeit – Verﬂechtung militär- ischer und juristischer Implementationsmaβnahmen zu Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts’, Militär- geschichtliche Zeitschrift, 72:1 (2013), 1–21; J.S. Martinez, The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012).

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information and cooperated with militaries and governments in support of their various causes. In this sense the diplomacy and security culture of the Vienna system already point to the transnational ‘polylateralism’ of more recent times, as they extended the multilateral ties among governments into wider social realms.16 These security arrangements, and other similar collective undertakings and institutions such as the ministers’ and ambassadors’ conferences in London and Paris after 1815 (see also the contributions of Schenk and Ghervas, Chapters 4 and 5 in this volume),17 constituted formative moments in the development of a nascent but veritable European security culture, fully acknowledging the fact that this culture ‘remain[ed] uneven and incomplete – as cultures usually are’.18 The question arises of course about the alleged novelty of this security culture after 1815. After all, continuities undoubtedly existed between 1815 and what occurred in previous decades and even centuries. The post-1815 security culture was the sum of developments, experiences, administrative practices and institutions that emerged in the pre-revolutionary, revolutionary and Napoleonic years. The international networks of sovereigns and their diplomats that were forged at least since the Peace of Utrecht already contained elements of a collective conception of a normative order.19 The Napoleonic occupation and conquest of Europe created an ‘inner empire’ whose benefits and advantages the post-1815 regimes took over for their central management of affairs, and which had in many cases already been introduced through reforms during the Napoleonic years in both satellite and enemy states.20 It was in the Napoleonic era, for instance, that we find the first attempts to regulate international riverine traffic; the new institution of the Central Com- mission of the Rhine created in 1815 had some continuity with the Rhenish Octroi of 1804 under Napoleon.21 One could similarly find earlier examples of

16 G. Wiseman, ‘“Polylateralism”: diplomacy’s third dimension’, Public Diplomacy (Summer 2010), 24–39. 17 Cf. N. van Sas, Onze Natuurlijkste Bondgenoot: Nederland, Engeland en Europa, 1813–1831 (Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff, 1985); R. Marcowitz, Grossmacht auf Bewährung: Die Inter- dependenz französischer Innen- und Aussenpolitik 1814/15–1851/52 (Stuttgart: Thorbecke, 2001), 48. 18 De Goede, European Security Culture,6–7. 19 F. Dhondt, Balance of Power and Norm Hierarchy. Franco-British Diplomacy after the Peace of Utrecht (Leiden: Brill, 2015); D. Onnekink and G. Rommelse (eds.), Ideology and Foreign Policy in Early Modern Europe (1650–1750) (London: Ashgate, 2011). 20 M. Broers, Europe under Napoleon, 1799–1815 (New York: Edward Arnold, 1996). See on ‘inner empire’ M. Broers, The Napoleonic Empire in Italy, 1796–1814: Cultural Imperialism in a European Context? (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), 213–74. 21 R.M. Spaulding, ‘Revolutionary France and the transformation of the Rhine’, Central European History, 44:2 (2011), 203–26; Spaulding, ‘Anarchy, hegemony, cooperation. International control of the Rhine river, 1789–1848’ (2007), 2, www.ccr-zkr.org/ﬁles/histoireCCNR/21_ anarchy-hegemony-cooperation.pdf (accessed 26 September 2017).

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combined Anglo-Dutch action against Barbary corsairs in the era of Charles II, but that was notably bilateral, not multilateral, in the manner of the institutions emerging after 1814. Moreover, the years of Anglo-Russian, and later also Anglo-Prussian- Russian-Austrian cooperation in the manifold coalitions against Napoleonic France forged a sense of shared fate, a solidarity and a modus of informal ‘horseback diplomacy’, which built networks of trust between Metternich, Castlereagh, Alexander I and Friedrich Wilhelm III, as well as among their diplomats and the smaller princes and sovereigns. The gains in mutual trust and transparency from such face-to-face summit diplomacy cannot be over- estimated in an age where distance and distrust had dictated international relations.22 Even if there is no sharp divide between the pre- and post-1815 epochs, and definitely not a ‘tabula rasa’, the perceptions and practices that emerged from the Vienna Settlement did reflect a more widely shared, and institutionally more deeply embedded, collective political will of Europe’s rulers to prevent, with measures of ‘salutary precaution’,23 the disasters of the French Revolu- tion and the Napoleonic conquest of Europe from ever occurring again. Not only was this an intensification, acceleration and convergence of longer-term trends.24 It was also experienced at the time as a new beginning, and as a shared belief that a peaceful new international order could be created by means of collective management. This effort at collective management was under- taken on the basis of norms and institutions designed to protect Europe against various security threats, including disputes between the states of Europe themselves, internal radical conspiracies, external attacks such as those by North African corsairs and financial and economic anxieties and crises.25

Historicising Security Current literature on International Relations has introduced the concepts of security, security cooperation and security culture, but in a highly presentist or generalising fashion, giving little or no attention to manifestations of collective

22 J. Paulmann, Pomp und Politik. Monarchenbegegnungen in Europa zwischen Ancien Régime und Erstem Weltkrieg (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2000). 23 Castlereagh, ‘Memorandum, 13 July 1815’. Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin (GStA-PK) III, Hauptabteilung (HA) Ministerium des Auswärtigen (MdA) I, Politische Abteilung, no.1464: Konferenzprotocolle der Minister der alliierten Mächte in Paris. 24 See for the acceleration argument R. Jones, ‘1816 and the resumption of “ordinary history”’, Journal for Modern European History, 14:1 (2016), 119–42. 25 E. Fureix and J. Lyon-Caen, ‘Introduction: le désordre du temps’, Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle, 49:2 (2014), 7–17.

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threat perceptions and security cultures prior to 1945, let alone 1918.26 In this volume, therefore, we aim to ‘historicise security’,27 that is, to pay attention to the intersubjective character of threat and interest constructions as these developed within historical contexts. Eckart Conze, to a lesser extent Martti Koskenniemi28 and most importantly Matthias Schulz, with his work on ‘norms and praxis’ between 1815 and 1860, have paved the way toward developing a profoundly transnational, multidisciplinary and cultural-discursive perspective on the combined history of international relations and internal policy.29 In exploring this path further, we aim to understand how European powers sometimes acted cooperatively in ways apparently unrelated to, or even contrary to, their own interests and at other times resorted to overt unilateral strategies of power and the direct use of coercive military force. Cultural repertoires of diplomatic exchange, mediation and arbitration and a ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ body of the ius publicum europaeum nevertheless survived such external ruptures. By stepping outside the usual path of research on war and peace, and pointing instead to a series of security regimes in peacetime and the security culture these produced, the present essays offer a fuller understanding of the origins, trajectories and determinants of nineteenth-century Europe’s international relations. In historicising security, we aim to take into account some of the conceptual and theoretical instruments developed in the context of present-day security studies, yet deploy them to construct a more historical framework for analysing the emergence of the security cultures: (1) the institutional structures and their corresponding interests; (2) identiﬁcation of threats and practices of assessing and neutralising them, including the demarcations between friends and foes, insiders and outsiders; (3) a closer look at the agents involved in these processes, and in particular at the emergence of a new class of professional

26 Cf. most chapters in the seminal volume of P.J. Katzenstein (ed.), The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Buzan et al., Security; M.C. Williams, Culture and Security: Symbolic Power and the Politics of International Security (London: Routledge, 2007); T. Balzacq (ed.), Securitization Theory: How Security Problems Emerge and Dissolve (London: Taylor & Francis, 2011); H. Müller, Die Chance der Kooperation: Regime in den Internationalen Beziehungen (Darmstadt: Wis- senschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993); Ibid., ‘Security Cooperation’, in W. Carlsnaes, T. Risse and B.A. Simmons (eds.), Handbook of International Relations (Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 2002), 369–91; De Goede, European Security Culture. 27 E. Conze, ‘Securitization. Gegenwartsdiagnose oder historischer Analyseansatz?’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 38:3 (2012), 453–67; B.A. de Graaf and C. Zwierlein, ‘Historicizing security: entering the conspiracy dispositive’, Historical Social Research, 38:1 (2013), 46–64. 28 M. Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 29 E. Conze, ‘Abschied von Staat und Politik? Überlegungen zur Geschichte der internationalen Politik’, in: U. Lappenküper and G. Müller (eds.), Geschichte der internationalen Beziehungen: Erneuerung und Erweiterung einer historischen Disziplin (Cologne: Böhlau, 2004), 14–43; Schulz, Normen und Praxis.

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diplomats and functionaries trained to monitor and interpret threats and interests, and to negotiate and mediate challenges and opportunities of international (dis)order. These three aspects of security cultures – and the practices that follow from them – imparted contexts and continuities for the security cultures and regimes that developed in the twentieth century. Studying collective security in these terms helps shed new light on the nineteenth-century prede- cessors, and attention to the latter in turn helps nuance broader understandings of the categories and of the actors, ideas and practices, as the chapters in this volume reveal.

Structure of the Book The three main elements of security cultures just defined provide the framework for this volume’s division into parts. The first part, ‘Conceptualisations’, explores conceptions of security and security structures in the first half of the nineteenth century, as a first foray into defining the ‘epistemic communities’ of actors and ideas that undergirded them and offering further considerations on how to think about security cultures. Matthias Schulz (Chapter 1) provides a systematic overview of the emergence of ‘cultures of peace and security’ within the international state system from 1815 to the present. For Schulz, these international cultures (as instantiated in the Concert of Europe, the League of Nations and the United Nations) are driven by a set of recurring dilemmas, originating from fundamental questions regarding the relationship between victorious and defeated powers after wars, the distribution of power, the procedural and normative setup and the corresponding modes of security governance. Only if a security institution is ‘owned’ by a strong and attractive alliance that has incentives to offer and is following a convincing set of norms and principles, can a collective security culture guarantee a lasting and just peace. Eckart Conze (Chapter 2) sets out some of the broader thinking about European security, and insecurity, at the time and among scholars today. Conze articulates how the concept of ‘security culture’‘can help to analyse the non-simultaneous dynamics of objective and subjective, national and international, foreign and domestic security and to describe the interaction of security-related discourses and security-related practices’. Matthijs Lok’s essay (Chapter 3) takes us back to 1815 as a moment when such an alliance tried to construct such a framework, and when everything seemed possible for building a new European peace and security system. As he shows, there were many far-reaching plans for European reconstruction at the time, not just among liberals, but equally among conservatives, including or especially religious conservatives. Nor did such plans fade after the final settlement in 1815 – that it fell so short of the hopes of many meant that visionary plans continued to surface in the decades thereafter.

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The three parts following concentrate respectively on institutions, threat perceptions and agents. Each contribution of course draws on the whole security cultures framework, of ideas, agents, institutions, threats and interests, but tends to concentrate on those aspects central to the separate parts. Part II, ‘Institutions and Interests’, focusses on the range of new institutions after 1815 lying between traditional bilateral relations from court to court and the new-style congresses that brought together the leading statesmen and rulers for face-to-face talks. Countering threats and protecting interests precipitated intense discussions about regulation, interventions and the possible juridification thereof. The proper methods to fight the North African corsairs, or to protect navigation on the Rhine for example, were already debated during the Congress of Vienna, and novel institutional structures were created to negotiate and defend these collective interests in the succeeding years. Respecting civil rights as well as weighing the use of force and intrusions into other countries’ territories proved bones of contention between groups of states and within their respect- ive societies. When formalising and determining discussions in these new councils, conferences and committees, distinctions were made between the political and commercial domains, between urban and maritime environments and between Europe and beyond (neighbouring states, the Ottoman Empire, colonies). Arbitrary acts of single states operating on the seas, exerting control over Europe’s rivers and persecuting foreign citizens and exiled communities were met with stiff opposition. Extradition treaties, for example, were negoti- ated within these institutional fora to enable convergence between European states on matters of political asylum,30 deportation procedures and named points of entry for deportees. Their main objective was to define whom states were obliged or willing to accept as such, and to ensure that those aliens most likely to be troublesome in this regard could be expelled at all times. Since ‘nationality’ and the status of aliens were not clearly demarcated yet in the immediate post-1815 period, the emergence of a security culture as international and transnational as it was did bring about the entrenchment of national responsibilities, thereby creating new identities and state bounda- ries. Anti-anarchist conventions, for instance, produced (secret) international administrative and police cooperation, while they simultaneously caused divergence on political and societal levels regarding questions of state and nationhood and extradition jurisprudences. New methods of anticipation, projection, reporting, monitoring and surveillance were also developed and deployed by the various institutions created in

30 See C. Shaw, Britannia’s Embrace: Modern Humanitarianism and the Imperial Origins of Refugee Relief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

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1815 and beyond, producing new ‘logics of security’.31 New instances of ‘precautionary security logic’32 blurred (legal) distinctions between war and peace, European expatriates and colonial indigenes, ‘good’ and ‘undesirable’ citizens, wanted and unwanted aliens, criminality and hostility, civilians and combatants. The standards for centralising, professionalising and modernising bureaucracies as well as management techniques that European states took from the Napoleonic era post-1815 were honed to seeming perfection.33 Varied types of councils, conferences and committees created rationalised security practices and new technologies, thus producing governmental and international security regimes that were also driven by economic rationalities. The European powers would never have consented to establish the highly supranational Central Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine (1815) without the pressure exerted on them by trading and shipping companies who championed free trade, secure passage, absence of arbitrary customs, more space for larger vessels and, eventually, steam-engineered flotillas. Joep Schenk’s contribution (Chapter 4) reconsiders this classic and seminal case of an international institution, the first in the modern sense and continuing today. Schenk shows how a cooperative framework could emerge from conflicting interests and disagreements about free trade and how the Rhine Commission became a forum for mediating protectionist and mercantilist economic rationalities. Stella Ghervas’ essay (Chapter 5) examines the role of the new congress diplomacy as representative of a partial shift from balance-of-power to what she aptly terms a ‘balance of diplomacy’. Security emerges as integral to conceptions of peace at the time, and the Holy Alliance treaty of Tsar Alexan- der I is seen to play a more prominent part than often thought in helping to draw European states into a cooperative framework. Brian Vick (Chapter 6) and Beatrice de Graaf (Chapter 7) each highlight perhaps the most important institutional innovation in nineteenth-century diplomacy, the ministerial or ambassadorial conferences, first instantiated in London and Paris from 1815–16. Even when not formally negotiating, these meetings kept the great power representatives talking together, offering greater transparency and a means of preventing as well as managing crises. Engaging in information- sharing and executive functions as well as handling diplomatic matters, the conferences helped keep potentially conflicting interests aligned in cooperative

31 The ‘logics of security’ connect a speciﬁc threat perception to a valued interest or vulnerability, constitute a security situation and dictate certain practices and procedures. Cf. De Goede, European Security Culture,6–7. 32 C. Aradau and R. van Munster, ‘Governing terrorism through risk: taking precautions, (un) knowing the future’, European Journal of International Relations, 13:1 (2007), 89–115. 33 T. Skocpol, Social Revolutions in the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

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frameworks. In the case of the London conferences, Vick shows how the Vienna Settlement reached beyond Europe through attempts to bring abolition of the African slave trade to the Atlantic World and to tackle the problem of corsairs in the Mediterranean basin and thereby relations with the North African regencies and the Ottoman Empire. Vick’s contribution also illumin- ates some of the ways in which new conceptions and languages of security and humanitarianism could interwine in the production of new international norms and practices. De Graaf follows with a study of the Allied occupation of France, especially the way this occupation was managed politically between 1815 and 1818 as an instance of the new European security system and corresponding culture at work. The preparations for this occupation, mainly through the deliberations and activities of the Allied Conference of Ministers, provide a perfect case study to show how contentious and conflict-ridden this allied cooperation was (on matters of finance, French politics and military administration), but also how it moved towards a more collective, consensual method of decision making in a highly volatile environment. This – until the present not fully contextualised and researched – Allied Conference was arguably the first instance where Europe’s system of collective security was inaugurated on the ground, albeit haphazardly and contested, between 1815 and 1818. Like Vick’s essay, this chapter shows how the allied powers tried to avoid and suppress revolutionary or counterrevolutionary extremes and steered a course of ‘balancing’ and reconciliation. Wolf Gruner’s essay (Chapter 8) on the German Confederation examines the largest cornerstone of the new European security system, designed to stabilise the European centre and provide an institutional structure for the cooperation of the thirty-eight remaining German states in relation to the other powers. He puts his analysis of the Confederation squarely in the context of European collective security operations, with the Bund as one of the pillars of this new post-Napoleonic security edifice, especially tasked with securing a ‘double balance of power’,as the Bundeskriegsverfassung put it: to provide security for the states of the German Confederation and at the same time for the ‘pacific state of Europe’.34 Part III, ‘Threats’, explores the perception of threats and the construction of interests. A recurrent aspect of the threats as perceived by European Restoration powers is the suspicion that most were figments of the imagination of reactionary rulers and overzealous police informers. In contrast to the depiction of a ‘phantom terror’, Ido de Haan and Jeroen van Zanten (Chapter 9) demonstrate that there was a wave of revolutionary revolts against the regimes established by the Vienna Settlement, but also a widespread doubt

34 A.H.L. Heeren, Der Deutsche Bund in seinen Verhältnissen zu dem europäischen Staatensystem; bei Eröffnung des Bundestages dargestellt (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1816), 14.

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regarding the extent to which these were part of an internationally orchestrated conspiracy.35 Analysing the way police services collaborated in attempts to identify such revolutionary concertation on a European scale, the authors show how this effort at collective security contributed to the very political tensions police surveillance aimed to prevent. The chapter by De Haan and Van Zanten leads perfectly to Karl Härter’s presentation (Chapter 10) of the German Confederation as a model of a ‘multilevel system of sovereign states with autonomous and different legal systems’. With the German Confederation, a whole new political and security regime entered the political arena, embracing new legal systems, administra- tions and instances of cooperation. Härter further demonstrates how the Con- federation functioned as ‘a transnational space’, which fulfilled an exemplary function in the emergence of a transnational network of police services com- mitted to fighting international political crimes. Even if it failed to prevent the revolution of 1848, it played a pivotal role in shaping the transnational policing of political subversion after 1815. David Laven (Chapter 11) challenges existing historiography of restoration Italy that has remained remarkably critical of the system established at the Congress of Vienna. He argues not only that most Italians were happy to see the establishment of a Habsburg hegemony, but that Austrian dominance was also the main driver for reform within the peninsula. At the same time, the major European powers were generally glad to see the Austrians as guarantors of stability in a traditionally contested area, where unrest or international rivalry risked triggering European war. One element of the Italian situation that especially underlined the new climate of collective security was the generally accepted need to defend the Papacy, while simultaneously encour- aging successive popes to forestall domestic unrest through adopting more progressive politics. This reflected the degree to which all of Europe’s major powers had to deal with either strong Catholic majorities or numerically significant Catholic minorities. The Vienna Settlement in Italy should not be viewed teleologically as a failure, but rather as yet another example of new modes of collective security management. Erik de Lange (Chapter 12) argues that the Congress of Vienna provided a platform on which the corsairing organised by the Barbary regents of Algiers was defined as a shared threat exerted by a common European enemy, but did not guarantee a joint response by the European powers. While smaller European powers, notably the Netherlands, declared an interest in forcibly repressing the threat the corsairs posed to their commercial interest, they only received support for active intervention when Great Britain perceived the

35 A. Zamoyski, Phantom Terror: Political Paranoia and the Creation of the Modern State (New York: Basic Books, 2015).

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need to prevent a coalition of Spain and the Netherlands and was able to connect this geopolitical interest to the moral cause of a fight against both Christian and African slavery. The latter motive formed the basis for an Anglo- Dutch coalition, which acted as the representative of a European ‘community of moral righteousness’ by subjecting Algiers to a lethal bombardment at the end of August 1816, destroying the corsair fleet at the cost of several thousand lives. Underlying the operations and strategies investigated in these chapters were distinct but contested lines of inclusion and exclusion, underpinned by parti- cularist or more universal principles. ‘Useful’ immigrants, artisans, merchants, professionals and European expatriates abroad could enjoy security provisions, whereas others (colonial populations, non-European foreigners, ‘troublesome’ aliens, vagrants, ‘mobile people’) became increasingly locked out of this system of expanding security regulations, or became targeted.36 Research into nineteenth-century threats tends to take threats and enemies as givens. These chapters aim to open the black box of threat production. Which threats were deemed so urgent, pressing and ‘general’ that they were perceived as ‘dangers to world community’? To unpack the objects of security production is as illuminating for analysing the level of constraints accepted as ascertaining what or who had to be protected. The construction of threats can be considered as an attempt to reiterate or consolidate systems of beliefs and commercial or professional interests and identities. At the same time, public voices made themselves heard in this process, interfering with and triggering decision making in security-related issues such as the slave trade, human trafficking and naval security, from the worries and media campaigns associated with the abolition movement in the early nineteenth century to those later in the century. The fourth and final part of the volume, Part IV, ‘Agents and Practices’, considers the actors, the practices and the networks of people and ideas that constituted the epistemic communities underlying the new security cultures. The ideas and practicalities that make up security culture thrive and are produced in a community of informed actors and agents. In the end, it is persons and personalities who shaped threat perceptions, set agendas, made decisions and reflected upon them, and helped to define the terms and languages surrounding the various security issues. Current literature on the history of International Relations still focusses on states and ‘powers’ as producers of threat identification. The call of Conze, in 2004, to include non- state actors and social and cultural factors in historical IR research has been heeded by scholars of migration and socioeconomic history and by some diplomatic historians, but has not been met for nineteenth-century transnational

36 Cf. Koskenniemi, Gentle Civilizer of Nations, 130.

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security history (as a distinct stratum between police/crime history on the one hand and the history of war and peace on the other). We therefore introduce a broad concept of ‘(professional) agents’ to the field of transnational security, including diplomats, ministers, consuls, police and judicial officials, navy and army officers, trading/insurance professionals, ‘freelancers’ (such as von Gagern), public experts and intellectuals. The Congress of Vienna heralded an age in which this guild of diplomats, experts and other professional agents steadily grew. Through informal or insti- tutionalised meetings (conferences), international courts, treaties, instances of arbitration, exchanges of letters, reports and negotiations, a body of ius europaeum publicum was forged. These instances of transnational exchange also facilitated social learning processes, e.g. social participation leading to a shared knowledge and understanding of the world and a common set of practices and way of comporting oneself, amounting to a ‘habitus’. As a result, collective threat discourses emerged and mutually shared norms and attitudes became instilled regarding the appropriate use of force, the ways and means to handle conflicts and disputes and the settlement and defence of shared interests. Through these expansive means of communication, the aggregate of ideas and concepts and the intensity of their circulation also increased. The final part of this volume therefore discusses the agents, who as members of an epistemic community acted upon deep-seated beliefs and convictions, even when they aimed to make realistic evaluations of threats and interests as guides to action. Constantin Ardeleanu (Chapter 13) investigates Friedrich von Gentz’s role from 1812 to 1828 as middleman between the Austrian government and the Wallachian princes, serving not only his own financial interest and Austria’s vital interests, but also those of the Wallachian princes in Bucharest, who through Gentz gained access to the intelligence network of the European great powers and thus were able to bolster their own position. Ardeleanu also brings in the hospodars’ perspective, based on Rumanian and Russian archives, to argue that this strategic connection gave the Danubian principalities a decisive geopolitical advantage in the Eastern Question left unresolved by the Vienna Congress, a matter which contined to be an immi- nent threat to Europe’s collective security until the outbreak of the war in 1828 between the Russian and Ottoman empires (and indeed beyond). Mark Jarrett (Chapter 14) focuses on the British Foreign Secretary Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh. While arguing that Castlereagh, like all other diplomats, was motivated by a realist maximisation of Britain’s interests, for which the talk of peace and concertation to a considerable extent constituted mere rhetoric, Jarrett at the same time emphasises how diplomats like Castle- reagh were formed by their experiences and viewpoints accumulated over long periods of time. It was political socialisation, notably shaped by the lengthy struggle against French Jacobinism and Bonapartism, which informed his beliefs about the most dangerous threats to the security of the continent and,

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by implication, of Great Britain. These mixed beliefs then informed his decision making in ways that could promote both British interests and collective security and peace in the years after 1813. Stepping beyond the ranks of major and minor diplomats per se, peacemak- ing at the end of the Napoleonic Wars brought onto the international scene new agents including financiers, rentiers and bankers, funding the future of Europe. Their presence reflected the emergence of a new capitalist economic order buttressed by industrialisation and imperialism. In the final chapter, Glenda Sluga (Chapter 15) investigates how questions of financial ‘security’ were brought before the peacemakers. She demonstrates how challenges of both political and economic insecurity were taken up at congresses, provoking diplomatic debates and practices that resonated the double meanings of ‘security’: physical safety and economic sureties. In this context, historical actors emerge from the shadows who are rarely included in Congress narratives or in conventional security studies: independent women, entrepreneurs, Jewish bankers and public intellectuals. We can hear in the voices of Sluga’s historical actors the echoes ‘not only of liberal internationalism, but of the late-twentieth century motifs of “Human Security”, freedom from fear and want’. With the author we affirm that ‘it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this strand of Congress history was as woven into the security culture of the early nineteenth century as “balance of power” doctrines, or the innovation of congressing itself.’

The Added Value of a European Security Culture For a long time the literature on the Vienna and Paris conferences has argued, as noted above, that the victors of 1813–1814 were mainly bent on restoring the ancien régime and securing a balance of power upheld by conservative states. And indeed, the logics of connecting security at the international level to security at home did mean that transnational threats of revolution and sedition were put high on the collective agenda. Instruments to neutralise the radical press, to curb extremes from the right and the left (both white and red terror), to guide refugiés and émigrés back to their indigenous countries, to return prisoners of war without delay: all these were persistently debated, contested and executed. An apparatus of informers was created in every capital – more often than not by relying on the structures built by Napoleon and his sentinels in the years previous. (The Dutch King William I, for instance, took over most of Louis Napoleon’s secret agents.37 The Austrians notoriously already had their own security police well in place.)

37 Cf. J. van Zanten, Schielijk, Winzucht, Zwaarhoofd en Bedaard: Politieke discussie en oppo- sitievorming 1813–1840 (Amsterdam: Wereldbibliotheek, 2004), 104.

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It would be fundamentally misguided, however, to conclude that the practices that resulted from the Vienna Congress were mainly restorative and repressive. The security logics dictating these practices were too divergent for that. Limited constitutional concessions to local aristocratic and bourgeois elites, for example, and efforts to ‘amalgamate’ the old and new nobilities, also shaped the search for a domestic stability that was meant in part to lay the foundations for international stability as well.38 This volume will demonstrate how the Congress acted as midwife to produce a new, open and contested European security culture spanning the domestic and international levels. The added value of the approach adopted here is threefold. First, applying concepts taken from the social sciences (such as ‘professional agents’, ‘social learning mechanisms’) and security studies (such as ‘silenced voices’ and ‘labelling’) can sharpen the analytical focus. By combining insights from contemporary security studies, international law and International Relations with empirical, historical research into the speciﬁc practices of security operations, this multidisciplinary approach enables us to ascertain and understand developments, variations and changes in European security culture. It contrib- utes to ‘historicising security’ by providing a conceptual framework for analysis and by hypothesising a relationship between the transformation of this European security culture and the normative and deliberative constraints operating at the time. Secondly, by focussing on the concept of security and security regimes/ cultures, instead of remaining locked in debates about the use of diplomacy to prevent war and create peace based on treaties between states, new insights emerge into the great variety of international cooperation and transnational security networks in peacetime. A diverse range of multilateral institutions ﬁlled the diplomatic space between bilateral exchanges and congress-based summit diplomacy and helped maintain European stability across the divide between the congress and concert eras. Even if the European security culture emerged after 1815 in the context of a peace settlement, its focus was much more than just peace, but involved a set of ideas and practices that could, and actually did, expand beyond the Vienna system proper, into the Atlantic and Islamic worlds and beyond. Moreover, viewing developments through the lens of security cultures might help overcome the dichotomy of foreign versus domestic policy and politics as dictated by twentieth-century monodisciplinary research paradigms. Security logics dictated an inextricable nexus between the external and the internal, foreign and domestic stability and order. As several contributors to this volume emphasise, attention to the transnational epistemic communities and processes

38 D. Laven and L. Riall (eds.), Napoleon’s Legacy: Problems of Government in Restoration Europe (Oxford: Berg, 2000); Vick, Congress, ch.6.

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of social learning among the agents operating in security contexts also helps explain the nature of domestic threat/interest demarcations. This approach tells us more about how governments developed prerogatives to execute discretion- ary powers in purported times of necessity, about their sense of the right to interfere in matters of vital interests and perceived threats in other countries and in citizens’ lives and about how security practices effectively conditioned civil liberties.39 The studies here also show how broader cultural trends could influence security cultures and their agents, as with the role of religious beliefs and identities that also emerge as significant in several chapters. Thirdly, and finally, by introducing this multidisciplinary approach to security history in the nineteenth century, we can contribute to the project of ‘historicising’ the Congress and its outcomes.40 Notions like ‘the balance of power’, ‘great power hegemony’, ‘equilibrium’ and ‘security’ should not simply be taken for granted; it is high time that they be studied as historical concepts, with their own historical trajectories of imbued meaning and political application.41 The Congress of Vienna and the Congress system most certainly were invoked to influence later international organisations and were recon- figured in successive peace conferences and subsequent security regimes, at moments of crisis and in day-to-day operations. This collection therefore appeals to the scholarly community to make further inroads into the existing corpus of literature on the European concert itself, to historicise that corpus and to develop a research agenda that accommodates a more dynamic, cultural and inclusive (i.e. non-hegemonic and possibly also non-European/colonial) understanding of the Congress system and the Concert of Europe. The scholars assembled here offer several insightful steps in this direction.

39 In this sense, such an approach also tests Koskenniemi’s thesis about the production of international law as a battleﬁeld between the imperial powers amongst each other and vis-a- vis indigeneous contenders attempting to impose their visions of justice. The production of international norms was not simply the consequence of an imperialist struggle with the universal human rights principle, but was equally the outcome of collective deliberations about threats and security interests. Koskenniemi, Gentle Civilizer of Nations,67–97, 116–78. 40 Q. Skinner, ‘The history of the concept of security. From the Roman Republic to the risk society of today’. Expert seminar, Centre for Advanced Security Theory, University of Copenhagen/ Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters (26–28 November 2012). 41 First attempts to historicise security have been made, e.g. the quest to embed the meaning and consequences of the security concept, and all of its adjacent notions, within its own historical context. See Conze, ‘Securitization’; De Graaf and Zwierlein, ‘Historicizing Security’.